The Breathtaking Impermanence Of Things
Thursday, January 12, 2023
A Gift And A Curse
Somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago, in a phase of my life I don't think much about anymore, I was sitting with a group of the kids who worked for me in one of the many gigs I took as a kind of retail/service mercenary, opening or closing locations, sometimes being the new sheriff in town, ready to lay down the law and turn those numbers around.
It was in that particular phase I learned that retail and service weren't going to work out for me, that the people I worked under would never promote someone with my outlook and attitude, regardless of numbers. It was also when I learned that the kids (even the ones who weren't kids at all) were the only real source of joy for me. Part of it was the energy, the crackle of youthful exuberance and poor life choices when poor life choices are still a thing you can bounce back from. But for the most part, it was because working with them was the only thing that made me feel like what I was doing actually meant something and could continue to mean something. For some of the kids, it was their first real job. For others, the first time they'd ever dealt with a manager who didn't immediately react to dysfunction with corrective action. My great hope, when I look back at that time, is always that I left them in a better place than I found them, that whatever we went through together, whatever stressful and absurd situation we found ourselves in, my presence was a net positive.
I don't remember what the topic of conversation was, but it somehow led to one of the kids, Sloane, sharing a story about a time she was walking down the street with a friend when a man neither of them knew pulled over in a van and called out "Hey, you girls wanna make some money?"
"Doing what?" she replied.
I remember lifting my head and looking at her, somewhere between horrified and amused.
"Just tell me you didn't get into the van," I said.
She didn't, as I recall, but I knew by then that there was commonality between Sloane and I. We shared a birthday, an addictive personality, and an endless struggle with saying no to things we knew were bad. We recognized one another, like alcoholics at a meeting.
I know more than most about good customer service, what brings people back and forges relationships that last in a community. You can teach any fool to make a smoothie or a latte, to restock a shelf or unload a truck. But you can't teach personality and you can't teach charisma. Sloane had both in spades. She had a thousand watt smile and a seemingly endless supply of weird and wonderful questions and stories. She was constantly asking me Would You Rathers. She engaged people. She was asked for by name.
She had a gift.
On the other side of the coin, she was lazy and unreliable. She drank and smoked too much. Once she showed up to work out of her skull on Xanax, slurring and stumbling to the point I had to send her home. That night, for the first time, I felt the eyes of some of the other kids on me.
Do something.
A few days later, I sat down with Sloane. I told her that her performance was unacceptable and that we had reached the limit of what I was willing to let slide in the name of us all being trapped in this shitshow together. Then I told her what I saw in her, what I admired, and shared that what I really wanted to do was let her use that gift, to be out there engaging people, growing the business, putting her name on things our much-maligned higher-ups paid attention to. She was better than what she was doing, I told her, but I needed to see a commitment.
She burst into tears. She thanked me. She promised I would have my commitment.
A few weeks later, she transferred to another store, and not too long after that, I left the company.
We remained friends on social media, though we only ever really spoke when June 14th, our mutual birthday, rolled around. Each year I'd post something, then go take a look at what she was up to, how she was doing. But for the most part, we were estranged.
I was having a conversation with a friend last night where the concept of birthday twins came up, and it was in the back of my mind as I lay sleepless in bed in the early hours of the morning. Finally, I rolled over, picked up my phone, and looked her up.
She died on December 1st. An overdose.
I sat there looking at a picture of that thousand watt smile, of a girl who could have done a thousand other things, and for a long time I thought about those kids and the many different circumstances that had led them to the stacked deck of minimum wage employment, of customer service, of being treated like shit and compensated like shit. It's no life, it really isn't, and I just wanted to make it a place where they learned something valuable.
I saw myself in Sloane. I saw myself in a lot of the kids. I saw them going places I'd been, and I tried, in my way, to be a guide, to be an example. But you can teach any fool to make a smoothie or a latte, to restock a shelf or unload a truck.
You can't teach them how to keep going.
posted at 7:01 PM
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Friday, December 18, 2015
Careful, Purposeful
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, my son will sit up and begin carefully re-arranging his pillow, blanket, and surrounding toys. He's sound asleep when he does this, but every movement is careful, purposeful, an unconscious feng-shui to ends neither he nor I will ever know.
I relish the times I'm awake for these performances. His bed lies cross-wise at the foot of mine, like a stage, and I watch with a father's tense concern, waiting for any sign that his odd, sleeping grace will desert him, that I'll be required to prevent him coming to harm on the edge of the bed or the floor.
I feel, in those moments, like there's nothing beyond these four walls, the limited reach of the nightlight, and this strange, secret show. I feel like everything is so okay that my heart might just stop.
posted at 11:39 PM
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Saturday, July 4, 2015
The Ballad Of The Motherfucker
I'm doing a lot of walking lately. It's the only thing that works when it's late at night and The Motherfucker decides to dig in, reminding me of its presence with a sequence of sharp stabbing pains that light up my left flank and occasionally napalm my gut for good measure. It's not unbearable, this pain, but its language is an infuriatingly irregular morse code that grits my teeth and clenches my fists.
So I get out of bed and I walk. I walk around the suburban community in which I now live, my route as random as The Motherfucker's reminders. Not that you'd notice; suburban apartments, suburban cars, suburban joggers and dog-walkers - it's all a little too Lynchian for my liking, a little too reminiscent of my time in Southern California. Every blind undrawn seems to present the same tableau - the back of the couch and the flatscreen TV, blue light flickering on uninspiring interiors.
Christ.
I'm not entirely sure how I got here. Metaphysically speaking, I mean. My life has always lacked agency (to the point where it may well be my defining characteristic), but what always seemed to me an ongoing series of mostly happy accidents fueled largely by whiskey and an impish desire to see what happens next has begun to feel swayed by entirely the wrong kind of momentum.
There's plenty I won't go into here out of a desire to protect the privacy of people I care about and avoid the horror of my son someday reading this before I've had the chance to explain, but those of you who are in my life know well enough that it had not been a good year even before The Motherfucker, so perhaps He isn't solely responsible for this feeling of ennui. All the same, though...
It started back in April. I was laying in bed one night when I began to experience discomfort in my left side. It felt like gas at first, but quickly intensified into what was probably the worst pain I've ever experienced. I ended up spending that night pacing around the apartment, unable to focus on anything but my next breath, wondering if I should get myself to the Emergency Room and engaging in the uniquely American activity of weighing my need to get medical attention versus the potential cost.
By the time dawn rolled around, the pain had eased off somewhat. I took the day off work to recover, and spent most of it on the couch, wondering what I'd done to myself and again considering my options if I wasn't feeling better by that evening.
I dislike doctors and hospitals, and with reason. My three overwhelming memories of that environment are the weeks preceding the deaths of my father and grandfather, and the last time I - as a very young boy - had an issue with my works that involved a great deal of blood and screaming and stitches in the absolute last location you would ever want them.
I share that in the hope that it - along with the financial burden - explains why I didn't go to the ER when The Motherfucker's Concerto reached a sweating, vomiting, agonizing peak that night, culminating in your narrator passing out from the pain, and why when I woke up several hours later to find that said pain had departed as suddenly as it arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief, went to sleep, and returned to work the following morning.
The Motherfucker went dark for a while after that first assault, but I had doubt to gnaw at my guts in His absence. I'd already lost a decent amount of weight at that point, and I was sticking to my diet and getting to the gym regularly. For the first time in my adult life, I felt as though I might actually reach a place where I could feel good about my body and my health.
But what about the damage already done? I've never eaten well, and the whiskey that fueled all those happy accidents mentioned earlier had no doubt wrought havoc on my insides. I lack the commitment to be an alcoholic, but I've been a drunk since the age of twenty-one. My flank didn't hurt at that point, but my insides felt wrong somehow, arranged in some fashion that wasn't normal.
What if I had liver disease? What if it was Cancer? My imagination, both best friend and worst enemy since I was very young, began constructing worst case scenarios. It's inoperable, the doctors said. Daddy has to go away now, I told my son.
And then, very much outside of my imagination, I started pissing blood.
That got me to the doctor, who referred me to a Urologist, who stuck a tube with a tiny camera on it into the last place you'd want someone to stick a tube, and I got to watch on a monitor as he took a look around my bladder until we came upon The Motherfucker, nestled snug and happy in a burrow of His own making, a little flesh Hobbiton.
As for doubt and worry, I decided to get a precautionary CT Scan on that whole area of my body, for my own peace of mind if nothing else.
So here we are. The Motherfucker, a kidney stone too big to pass, will be broken down via some improbably futuristic internal laser surgery next Friday. His last hurrah will be the pain eliminating those pieces from my body will no doubt cause me. Until then, and until I get the results of that scan, both He and my imagination will be doing their best to give me a few sleepless nights.
I'm hoping that's the best they've got.
posted at 11:22 AM
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Saturday, March 14, 2015
Everything Is Broken
Twenty years ago and five thousand miles away, I stopped off at a record store on my way home from school to buy my copy of Radiohead’s second record, The Bends. I don’t exactly recall laying my money down on the counter or rushing home with the CD clasped in my sweaty hands, but the baritone howl that leads into the first chords of the album’s opener, Planet Telex, still gives me goosebumps.
It had been a little over a year since I’d arrived home to find my mother waiting for me at the front door with the news that my father had died, and I’d elected – in a way that remains characteristic of my approach to trauma – to carry that particular cross on my back right through the horrors of puberty. I was still, on the outside, a fairly normal teenager, but my preference was increasingly for my own company, for staying locked in my room with loud music, for thoughtful, late night walks where I smoked Marlboro Lights until I felt ill and tried to wrestle my thoughts into some kind of coherence.
I’d never wish to be fifteen again – 1994 was the worst year of my life and ’95 wasn’t too far behind – but all these anniversaries can't help but remind me how it felt when everything meant something, when keeping my wounds open and bleeding was a source of dumb pride. On a date a few months back, a woman who barely knew me said I was calcifying. I sneered at the language, following as it did a conversation about her weekly therapy sessions, but the accuracy of the sentiment wasn't lost on me. My problem these days is that I barely feel at all.
The Bends is a criminally overlooked part of Radiohead's canon. Its predecessor, Pablo Honey, is more or less a by-the-numbers indie rock record, likeable but nothing special, and the two albums that followed, OK Computer and Kid A, are probably the most celebrated of the band's entire output. The Bends is just sort of there, a surprisingly good follow up to a mediocre debut that nonetheless lives in the shadow of its successors.
It's my favorite of Radiohead's albums by some distance, largely because it found me at a time in my life when I needed it, but also because it represents - with the benefit of hindsight and context - the last time that this was a band without artifice. If Pablo Honey is the sound of a naive Radiohead without direction, The Bends is their epiphany, a realization of the monster they were creating and becoming. They made smarter records afterwards, clever cultural critiques that were successful enough to encourage ever bolder steps, but it was never this personal again.
Lyrically, there's resistance to this thematic progression. Perhaps the main reason The Bends resonated so strongly with me is that so many of the songs are pleas from somebody falling beneath the waves of a world they can't find a place in. No accident that the album is named for decompression sickness.
"Where do we go from here?" asks the very first line of the title track. "The words are coming out all weird. Where are you now, when I need you?"
It's the first of many questions and accusations. "You're turning into something you are not," Thom sings on High And Dry, then later, on My Iron Lung: “We’re too young to fall asleep, too cynical to speak. We are losing it, can’t you tell?” and on Black Star: “What are we coming to? I just don’t know anymore.”
The album’s closer, Street Spirit (Fade Out) ends with the repeated line, “Immerse your soul in love,” which, within the context of both song and record, seems a final plaintive demand to hold on to something.
Interestingly, the second line of the very first song on OK Computer is: “In a neon sign scrolling up and down, I am born again.”
I didn’t apply such analysis to The Bends when I was fifteen. I just knew it spoke to me and understood me. Before I started writing this, I looked up the record store where I’d picked up the CD, curious to see exactly how many miles away it was. Seeing the names of streets I hadn’t thought about in forever provided a juxtaposition with the lyrics I planned on referencing that was almost nostalgic. Twenty years ago, I lived somewhere between the two, walking endlessly through suburbs that never felt like home, trying to understand who I was and where I was going. Now, I don’t know. I feel a certain amount of peace, I suppose, but it’s academic. I can put the events and the emotions in their right places, construct something linear that makes some kind of sense, but most of the time I feel like all I did was age, like twenty years isn’t much more than a heavy coat you can wrap around yourself so nobody sees the scars. Like there is no grand narrative, just a suspicion, ever less subtle with each year that passes, that this is it.
Or, to take it all the way back to Planet Telex: “You can crush it but it’s always here. You can crush it but it’s always near, chasing you home, saying everything is broken.”
posted at 12:09 PM
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Monday, June 9, 2014
On Cultural Background Noise And Saucepans To The Face
I hadn't thought about Rik Mayall in years. Part of that's cultural relevance and part of it's living in a country where he was a cult figure as opposed to a well-known comic. In a way, that made waking up this morning to the news of his passing even more of a shock. It's a sad reminder of the impact a man had on your formative years that comes in the form of his demise.
I've seen The Young Ones, of course, but I was five years old when the final episode aired. Mayall's presence in my life was far more a product of his later work, particularly Bottom, which was so woven into the fabric of my teenage experience that I can still quote it now, well over a decade after I last watched an episode.
This was the early nineties, of course. Four TV channels, no internet. I'd park myself on the couch and watch it when it was on or take my chances with the timer on the VHS recorder, a risky endeavor at the best of times. When it was over, the half an hour per week that was all you got back when TV seemed absurdly rationed compared to what we watch now, I'd go to bed, ready to share and re-enact my favorite scenes with my friends the following day.
That feels like a very long time ago, but I keep being reminded of it lately. It's twenty years since a very important time in my life; anniversaries are near-constant, grimly punctuated with the inescapable reality of mortality as another familiar figure passes on.
I was discussing with a friend the other day how it felt as though my childhood memories, especially pre-puberty, seemed attached to disasters, that I tend to remember things in context of when they happened in relation to cataclysmic events, to Lockerbie or Zeebrugge or The Challenger. I've been thinking about that a lot recently, and it's occurred to me that what's changed - for me, at least - is the idea of constant cultural background noise in the form of TV and radio, two mediums that have undergone drastic change in the last two decades.
When David Frost died last year, I was saddened because I was an admirer of his work, and as somebody deeply fascinated by a certain period in US history, his interviews with Nixon (and the story around them) are one of the most interesting pieces of journalism I've ever encountered. But I also knew David Frost as one of the background voices of my childhood, on TV-AM when I was getting ready for school five days a week for what must have been nearly ten years. I wasn't terribly interested in what he had to say back then, of course, but hearing his voice now takes me back to that time and place so completely that his passing carries a deeper sadness, a loss of not only the man, but of the feelings he provoked, a piece of a childhood growing ever more distant.
There's a larger essay here, I suspect, a tale of the cheerfully Orwellian nature of always-on TV and radio as opposed to the limitless choice we now have, which - somewhat perversely - serves to narrow the breadth of what we're exposed to. But the reason I sat down to write this was that Rik Mayall is dead, I remember him fondly, and I'm sad.
RIP Rik, and if there's a heaven, I bet St. Peter won't be expecting a saucepan to the face.
posted at 1:14 PM
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Wednesday, April 9, 2014
With Your Feet On The Air And Your Head On The Ground
The
first time I heard The Pixies would have been sometime in 1994, a
year in which my life went very sideways. The song in question was
Wave Of Mutilation, a version
of which appeared on the soundtrack of the movie Pump Up
The Volume, a movie that turned
out to be oddly influential in my life.
In
case you're not familiar, Pump Up The Volume
is a cult-ish teen flick starring Christian Slater as Mark Hunter, an
Angry Young Man who rails against his high school, his parents, and
his vision of America by starring in his own pirate radio show as
Happy Harry Hard-On, a foul-mouthed, lecherous, and righteous
character the polar opposite of the mild-mannered Hunter. It's not a
great movie – there's some serious cringe on display, and like a
lot of films from the early nineties, it hasn't aged well – but
there are moments and scenes that transcend the packaging, and
watching it again now, it's obvious to me that my attraction to
outspoken outlaw figures like Bill Hicks and Hunter S. Thompson
started here, with a character that rents Lenny Bruce's How
To Talk Dirty And Influence People
from the library in a movie that features Henry Rollins on its
soundtrack.
And
oh, that soundtrack. I like to think that Rollins, Leonard Cohen, The
Descendents, and The Pixies would have found their way to my heart
sooner or later regardless, but we first met on a summer evening in
the mid-nineties, when – home and bored on a Friday night – I
decided that the film on Channel 4 looked interesting enough to
watch.
Four
TV channels, pirate radio, VHS... Nothing makes you feel old like
technology. Memories are trickier. I vividly recall going to Variety
Video on Deansbrook Road almost every night of what feels like one
endless summer but was actually two or three. My friend Nick had been
a movie nut before we met, and when he dragged me into his world of
straight-to-video horror and sci-fi, I came packaged with a desire to
see movies that spoke to me. We grew together that way, embracing
each other's taste, but understanding that each was an antidote to
the other. That combination is still everything I love about fiction.
We
usually spoke to the manager when we went to rent movies. Nick was
such a good customer that he got to rent everything at the lowest
possible rate. Every now and again we'd see somebody else, though,
and I remember walking into the store one afternoon and finding a guy
behind the counter I wasn't familiar with. The screens that usually
played some new release were blank, and instead of the dialogue we'd
gotten used to hearing as background while we browsed the shelves, he
was listening to music. I didn't recognize the upbeat tempo or the
wailing guitars, but as soon as I heard the vocal melody, I knew the song.
“This
is The Pixies,” I said.
They
loved us at Variety Video. A couple of kids with a seemingly
insatiable appetite for movies of dubious quality, how could they
not? But the thing I remember most about the place was how that guy's
face lit up when a lanky teenager – in the era of Take That and The
Spice Girls - recognized Wave Of Mutilation.
Taste
is a funny thing. When it comes to music, I can't think of a single
artist I have always liked. Even when it comes to my absolute
favorites, there are periods where I just couldn't relate to what
they were doing. I like very little of REM's output after New
Adventures In Hi-Fi, my love of
Radiohead has been in steady decline since The Bends,
and I've had an on-and-off relationship with punk since not too long
after my fateful collision with Pump Up The Volume.
But even with that in mind, my relationship with The Pixies is an odd
one. In 2014, I adore them. They may well be my favorite band. But
having discovered them in '94, I didn't actually buy any of
their records until a little over ten years ago, and that was only
because I stumbled over Death To The Pixies,
a greatest hits collection, on sale at a market stall. Prior to that,
they just seemed to show up to soundtrack my life at appropriate
times.
In
1999, I was working as a projectionist at a movie theater just
outside London. It was the summer of The Matrix
and The Phantom Menace.
It was also the summer of Fight Club,
a movie I fell in love with instantly and completely. If Pump
Up The Volume made perfect sense
to a boy who'd just lost his dad and was discovering new ways to be
pissed off at the world, Fight Club
played the same role for a man feeling he was dead-ending in life,
failing in all the important ways in large part because he couldn't
understand why they were important. In the background of both, the
dissonance of The Pixies. Fight Club
ends with the track Where Is My Mind?,
and – like the boy in Variety Video five years previously – I
knew who it was as soon as I heard Frank Black's distinctive vocals.
In
August of 2001, at the Leeds Festival, I got so out of my mind on
Saturday evening that I awoke on Sunday morning in front of the main
stage, laying on the grass in bright sunshine, both hungover and
coming down while And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead assaulted
the eardrums of the thirty or so people that were actually awake and
capable of behaving like a human audience after the carnage of the
night before. After a while, I hauled myself to my feet and trudged
back to the tent I was sharing with my friend Chris. He was nowhere
to be found, so I overdosed on painkillers, drank a bottle of mineral
water, and headed back to find a considerably larger
crowd watching a band I didn't know. I walked a little way up the
hill, and as I sat down to feel sorry for myself, internally debating
the wisdom of seeing if I could just carry on drinking, they began to
play a song I did know.
The
band was Frank Black And The Catholics. The song was Where
Is My Mind?
A
little later that day, Chris and I would adopt Rancid's Leicester
Square as an unofficial anthem
for a friendship that consisted mainly of car-wreck nights in London
that frequently ended in strange and violent ways. Lyrically, it made a lot more sense of who we were and what we were doing at the
time. But still, those haunting backing vocals and Frank Black's
nonsense lyrics about being chased by fish linger longer in the mind.
In
2011, I put my phone on my pregnant wife's belly and played a lullaby
version of Where Is My Mind? to Ryan when he was still in utero.
Nobody
wanted to go and see The Pixies with me when they came to Portland
earlier this year. They weren't interested, it was too expensive, it
wasn't The Pixies without Kim Deal... I thought it might be the last
opportunity I'd get to see them live, so I decided to go by myself.
I've been wanting to write this since then, because I didn't go into
that show thinking about moments in my life and what they meant. I
went into it excited about seeing a band I liked.
They
didn't talk. They didn't move around much. They just played. I was
disappointed when they threw away Wave Of Mutilation
by playing it second, I sang along with Monkey Gone To
Heaven and Debaser,
and I fell in love with Hey
in a way I never had listening to Doolittle. But when I heard the
first few chords of Where Is My Mind?,
I suddenly felt I was in all the places I've written about here at
once, looking at my life from a great height instead of being buried
in the minutiae of my day-to-day. It wasn't revelatory in the sense
of being shown new things, but in giving them a certain perspective,
in casting light on those incredibly fine threads I'm so fascinated
by, that string moments together to form scenes, to form chapters, to
form stories. It's just stuff. It's just living. But when Frank Black
opens his mouth to sing, it's all connected and it all makes sense.
posted at 3:31 PM
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Wednesday, January 1, 2014
On Pragmatism, Lullabies, And Angsty Manchildren
I
thought I was going to end 2013 surprised to have made it, a
bewildered survivor counting dubious blessings, limbs numb from
treading water, year defined by a near-death experience in the back
room of an office supplies store that felt at once reason and
epitaph.
Here
lies Michael, killed by a wisdom tooth while working at a retail
store in the suburbs. Dead because switching jobs all the time means
gaps in medical coverage, means finding yourself stuck in mediocre,
uninspiring places surrounded by mediocre, uninspiring people, your
range of options narrowing with each passing year until all you can
do is the same thing over and over until something stops you.
An allergy to penicillin, for example.
That
image of myself should have inspired me to pick myself up, to do
something different. I've always been a man of passionate vows and
lofty goals, and those dreams and promises are most of the reason the
idea of expiring as a fat thirty-something at the Wilsonville Office
Depot was so darkly amusing and desperately sad. This time, though,
it was a brief epiphany in a dark time of my life, a flash of
headlights on the face of a man walking through what was starting to
feel like a very long tunnel.
At
the start of 2013, I was sleeping on an air mattress in an
unfurnished room in a house with two guys I found on Craigslist. My
marriage was over, my job was coming to an end, and I had no idea
what I was going to do. I'm not and never have been able to talk to
other people about my feelings - a factor in the reality of no longer
being married, yes - and I struggle to process and define my own
emotions sometimes, but I was very depressed, and I'd be lying if I
said some very stupid thoughts didn't slide through my mind a time or
two.
My
marriage had been ending for a while. It was a shock to people on the
outside, but that's what happens when one half of a partnership is a
very private person and the other half vents repressed feelings as
tattoos and confusing essays years after the fact. The truth of it is
that we grew apart. We were kids when we met. My grown-up wife is sensible and logical, concerned with the future and with building
stable structures to house it in. Her grown-up husband is a slightly
more coherent teenager, happiest in transience and always at
uncomfortable angles to things like mortgages and 401ks. Over time,
our pieces stopped fitting together quite the way they had. It
happens.
We
decided, initially, on a trial separation, which was how I ended up
in the Craigslist House (which sounds like the worst of all possible
ideas for a reality show). It was supposed to be a temporary thing,
some time apart to figure our own shit out and then maybe, hopefully
our marriage. It became a permanent thing the night I discovered my
wife had been spending time with a man I didn't know behind my
back.
The
last few months we were in California, I worked a bar job evenings
and weekends and looked after Ryan during the day. He was at that
difficult age where he was mobile and active but not yet aware and
smart enough to be left to his own devices, even for a minute or two.
It was in that space of time that I discovered how exhausting
parenting can be, and how rewarding. There were a hundred different
bonding moments, but the one that ended up mattering most happened
entirely by accident. I'd put a movie on the TV as background while
we played in the living room. I don't remember what it was, but it
gave way to the Johnny Cash biopic Walk
The Line
without me really noticing. The only reason I became aware of it at
all was because Ryan was suddenly and completely captivated by the
music, laughing and clapping his hands. It was the first time I'd
seen him really engage with something like that.
So
I sang him Johnny Cash songs. He'd sit in his chair while I took a
shower in the morning and laugh at my renditions of Walk
The Line
and Ring
Of Fire;
when I lulled him for his afternoon nap, I'd sing Cash melodies with
my own made-up lyrics about little boys needing to go to sleep. I
mentioned the way he'd reacted to the movie to my wife, of course,
but I never talked about the singing. It was ours.
By
the time November 5th
of 2012 – a night I'd remember forever even if there wasn't a rhyme
entirely dedicated to not forgetting the fucking date associated with
it – rolled around, my Johnny Cash lullabies were at their peak. I
don't have his range, so I'd take the pitch up a little, and on a
song like Folsom
Prison Blues,
this lent itself rather naturally to a slower, bluesy sort of thing I
was secretly quite proud of, and which I sang to Ryan that night
because my wife wanted to go and see a movie and asked if I minded
watching him for a few hours. The Craigslist House didn't lend itself
well to the presence of an infant, so my time with Ryan was spent at
the Beaverton home I was temporarily estranged from.
It's
a good memory, the last of that part of my life, sitting in a rocking
chair with my son in my lap, watching him smile at my soft voice,
watching his eyes fall half-lidded and then closed, gently laying him
down in his crib. I carry it with me in a way I carry few others.
My
wife came home not long afterward, complaining that she felt sick and
just wanted to go to bed. I walked down to my car, drove around the
corner, and waited.
It
gets a little blurred around the edges after that, but I remember
very clearly how I felt sitting in the car. My stomach hurt and I
could taste bile in my throat. My hands were shaking. The signs had
gotten too obvious to ignore, and you don't spend seven years with
someone without learning their tells.
After
a few minutes, a car I'd never seen before pulled into our
cul-de-sac. I got out of my own car, pulled my hood up over my head,
and walked to the corner, where I watched the driver being welcomed
into my house.
My
house. By my wife. While my kid slept upstairs.
There
are two sides to every story. A year on, I can see that. I can look
back and I can see that I wasn't entirely the victim. I am a flawed
man. I have behaved in ways I'm not proud of, I have let down my
loved ones, and I have sometimes failed as husband and father and son
and friend. But I have never done to another person what was done to
me that night.
I'm
partial to the idea that we each carry in our wake a comet trail of
the things that make us who we are, memories and events, thoughts and
feelings, flotsam and jetsam. It's about as close as I get to the
idea of a soul, because not all of these are things we're consciously
aware of. Walking towards my house that night, my mind a white-hot
and mostly incoherent blank of anger and hate and betrayal, intending
nothing but violence, fingers already closing around the key in my
pocket, shaking uncontrollably, those things were what saved me.
Saved us.
Folsom
Prison Blues,
this particular chapter of my biography is titled, Or
How Much I Love That Fucking Kid.
This
is a lot more than I intended to share, but I hope that it
illustrates and perhaps excuses the head-down pragmatism with which I
approached much of 2013. I got a new job and I got the bills paid on
time. I got out of the Craigslist House and out of the suburbs and
found a wonderful little apartment in the city, a space of my own for
the first time in a long time and a place where my little boy can
hang out with me. I dated – too soon, probably, but I was lonely –
a variety of strange and beautiful women, and somewhere along the
line I realized that those women wanted
to
date me, that I wasn't the angsty manchild I'd seen through another
person's eyes for far too long. With that realization came fresh
perspective on the last months of my dumb, dying marriage. I can't
and won't forgive, but I hope I can understand enough to take us down
the road of co-parenting and eventually some kind of friendship we're
currently walking.
In
November, a year after the fact, I externalized all that with fresh
ink and a commitment to myself to put it in the rearview and move on.
It's time.
A
lot of what I wrote last year, both publicly and privately, was about
growing up and – slightly perversely – about finding a context
for failure. To take it all the way back to the first essay I wrote
here, I lived in a world of princesses and dragons for far too long.
I had hoped, in my newfound pragmatism, to find a place in my head
where I could deal with just being myself, with having my son and my
job and my friends and a roof over my head. With that being enough.
My entire adult life, I've put tremendous, unending pressure on
myself to be A Writer, whatever that means, and these last several
years, caught between that pressure and the reality of growing older,
of increasing responsibility, the procession of soul-destroying
retail jobs that gnawed incessantly at the corners of my motivation
and my health, I'd begun to feel that something had to give. I'm a
talented writer, sure, passionate about it to the point of idiocy,
and if I could make a living from it I would want for nothing more.
But I've done nothing of note for seven years – seven
years
– and even then it was never more than a collection of above-par
erotica, some promising shorts, a single print credit, and a hard
drive so full of aborted stories and stillborn ideas it'd break your
heart. My day job was eventually going to grind me into powder, but
everything I built in 2013, that relentless drive to push back the
walls and make some space for myself, was funded by it. If one of
them had to go, it was never going to be Office Depot.
Only
it was.
2013
was, for me, a year filled with small victories achieved through
sheer bloody-mindedness and largely uncelebrated. When my boss
invited me into his office and read to me from a pre-prepared script
an explanation of the elimination of my position, I wasn't angry. I'd
known it was coming. I wasn't even angry when he explained that my
new position wasn't a demotion but would nonetheless cost me roughly
fifteen grand a year. I was, after all, a pragmatist, cool-headed and
logical. The math no longer added up, so I'd simply have to find
something else to do.
I
applied for only one job that afternoon. My resume has always been
solid, but when I read over the cover letter I'd written to accompany
it, I felt a little tweak of excitement. I was a good candidate for
this job, maybe a great one, and I'd composed a wonderfully concise
explanation of who I was and what I brought to the table. In my
experience, good feelings are all too often followed by crappy
realities, but I couldn't shake this one.
They
got back to me that same afternoon. Within a few days, I'd given a
decent account of myself over the phone and then an in-person
interview that was as confident, charming, and professional as I have
ever been in my life. I walked out of that office knowing I'd done
it. I walked straight past the elevators and ran
down
the stairs like a kid on Christmas morning. That weight on my
shoulders, fifteen years of it, was shifting.
One
more interview, not quite as good the first but with an air of
informality about it, of necessary crossing and dotting. Then more
running, this time off the sales floor at Office Depot a few days
later to answer my phone, to be offered the job. I accepted
immediately, then walked very calmly back to my boss's office, the
same room I'd almost died in seven months earlier, and gave my
notice.
No
more evenings, no more weekends, no more late nights and early
mornings, no more holidays. In a final Fuck You to the industry that
had dominated my entire adult life, my last day was November 27th,
the day before Thanksgiving.
If
I could have one memory of 2013, it would be sliding behind the wheel
of my car at the end of my shift on the day I gave my notice. I sat
there for a while, looking out through the windshield at nothing in
particular, just breathing, aware of the tears in my eyes, of this
huge and stupid feeling of joy way down in my guts I had only one
real way of dealing with.
I
had to write about it.
posted at 5:43 PM
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Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Remember, Remember
Over the last several years, I've developed a stock answer to the question of what any or all of my tattoos mean.
"Get me drunk and I'll tell you," I say, with a smile, though I've no intention of doing so.
It isn't because I don't like you or trust you, and it isn't because I'm especially insular and secretive. It isn't even because of the slightly condescending tone in which this question is usually asked, as if the matter in question were akin to a notebook of mawkish poetry any right-minded person would take a giant shit on.
It's because I didn't get them for you.
My reason for participating in what is, without context, a remarkably strange ritual, is expression. A different form from my writing, sure, but with a similar motive. Outwardly manifesting how I'm feeling - telling stories, ridding myself of the things that gnaw at me in various ways - is therapeutic for me. I like to define my hopes and especially my fears, to give them shape and bring them into the light.
In a lot of ways, my tattoos are memorials, markers for who and where I've been at the various stages of my life that really seemed to matter, from a boy of eighteen with a simple star that stood for simple feelings to a man of thirty-four looking for a way to somehow express a decade-long, continent-spanning tale of love, loss, and self-discovery. How do I explain that in a way that fits the conversation, that fits you and I in a bar, a chance reveal of the Latin phrase written on the inside of my wrist?
Auribus tenere lupum, it reads - I hold a wolf by the ears. Above this, a stylized design of the animal in question, its flank adorned by three stars, the second of which is the simple thing I asked for in a shop in King's Lynn seventeen years ago, incorporated into the newer design, new meaning layered over old, growing, evolving. Not a sentence. Not even a paragraph. There are years in those lines, feelings, experiences, clumsy slices of life, a thing almost indefinable if you aren't the one that lived it.
And you ask me what it means. Nothing. Everything. To borrow another Latin phrase, res ipsa loquitor - let the thing speak for itself. Let it mean whatever you think it means; I didn't get it for you.
If not what, then, I can tell you why. It's the permanence that speaks to me, scarring as art, a ritualistic closing of wounds and a romanticized reminder that those particular demons and the folks that conjured them are behind me, a part of the terrible and fantastic comet trail of experience that defines who I am now, far from home and with stories worth telling.
posted at 9:49 PM
---------------------------------
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
On Being A Little Broken
Marriage, for me, was an insular experience, a sort of you-and-me-versus-the-world that gradually turned into more of a you-versus-me-versus-the-world for reasons I want to say aren't terribly relevant to this essay but probably are.
Point is, I've never been one to cultivate a large number of friendships, and when I was married, that singular connection and a couple of satellites were all I wanted and needed.
Post-separation, I've done a lot of dating, and with the chances of meeting eligible, interesting, interested women while working at an office supplies store in the suburbs of Portland a touch on the low side, much of it has come from online dating sites.
By way of disclaimer, a part of this equation is obviously me. As a datee, I am interesting by virtue of being from another country, full of odd stories, and sometimes quite frighteningly able to walk the tightrope between my natural awkwardness and the charm I must have somehow absorbed from my dad to create something that is, apparently, quite attractive (or at least attractive enough to distract from the slightly fat ginger monster thing). At the same time, I'm very guilty of both wanting (nay, demanding) my own space while simultaneously allowing bouts of intense loneliness and boredom to drag and sometimes hold me in orbits I've no business being in.
I'm honest about that. To a fault. There's no shame in being a little broken. To paraphrase Doug Stanhope, the parts of you that don't work the way they should are about the only interesting thing about you dreary, bleak motherfuckers.
Online dating, by comparison, is all about dishonesty, both in the obvious sense of having to build a profile that makes you seem like somebody people might want to meet, interact with, fuck, and possibly even form some kind of longer-term bond with, and in a second sense far more interesting to me, that being the common reaction to the removal of the social norms that go along with dating somebody who continues to exist in your life pre and post.
Early in my online dating experience, I met somebody I really clicked with, both intellectually and physically. I liked her a lot, but as I was drawn into her life over a period of a month or so, I found I didn't much like her friends or the kinds of places she liked to go so socially. At the same time, she began to give the impression that the fact we weren't spending more than an evening or two a week and sometimes less in each other's company might be a bit of an issue.
So I stopped contacting her.
I wanted that last sentence to sound awful, because no matter how much you sugar-coat it (and you can bet your sweet ass I'm about to), it's pretty fucking terrible to stop talking to someone you've been intimate with just because. But I would be doing her a disservice if I said that she was desperately trying to contact me and I was ignoring her. There was an organic element to it. I was out of town, our communication fell off dramatically, and I allowed starting a new job, moving into a new apartment, and figuring out how to accommodate my son to gently nudge her out of my life. At one point, weeks on, we arranged to meet up. I genuinely wasn't able to make it, let her know in advance that this was the case, and we've had no contact since.
What I should have done was told her the truth, and if it means anything at all, I've made a point of doing exactly that in all my dating interactions since, because I like to think that I'm less a douchebag and more a person that makes mistakes, admits and learns from them, and hopefully becomes a little better at relating to others.
Of course, there are times when those are one and the same thing.
Prior to writing this, I had in my phone a list of women with an abbreviation of the dating site I use in place of their last name. I had not dated all of these women, but over the last seven months or so, these are the people with whom I've reached the point of exchanging numbers and real (I hope) names. I was able to delete all but two of these with pretty much zero risk that I'd get a text from an unrecognizable number at some point in the near future wondering what I'm doing Saturday night.
I don't want to dwell on how many, because the point isn't to boast or to be slightly horrified at becoming a serial dater in my limited free time, but it's odd to think that so many people have passed through my life in such a way as to leave almost no evidence of their presence, that so many potential friendships and relationships can be dismissed and forgotten through the simple act of removing a name from my list of contacts.
More interesting still the overwhelming evidence of my online dating experience, which is that most people - when you remove the mortifying possibility of seeing John at the water cooler Monday morning or explaining to mutual friends why you and Cindy aren't hanging out so much anymore - will cheerfully fuck with you by flaking on dates, standing you up, using you for sex, or just plain disappearing without explanation when they feel things aren't working out.
The long and short of it is that people are mostly dicks. Not all people and not all the time, but enough to make you question the integrity of that 95% match with the shared interest in the lesser-known works of DeLillo and that awesome picture with the baby sloth, and then you're back at square one, lost among strangers, seeking some connection even you don't fully understand.
You versus the world.
posted at 11:11 PM
---------------------------------
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Pride
Years ago, on the eve of one of our quarterly meetings, one of my many managers sent out an email that was headed with a lengthy quote I recognized immediately. He'd edited it for brevity and for bad language, but it was the speech Al Pacino gives to his team towards the end of the movie Any Given Sunday.
I don't know what to say, really. Three minutes to the biggest battle of our professional lives. It all comes down to today, and either we heal as a team, or we're gonna crumble, inch by inch, play by play, until we're finished. We're in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And we can stay here, get the shit kicked out of us, or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb outta hell one inch at a time. Now, I can't do it for you, I'm too old. I look around, I see these young faces, and I think, I mean, I've made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make. I've pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who's ever loved me. And lately, I can't even stand the face I see in the mirror.
You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. I mean, that's...that's a part of life. But you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life's this game of inches, and so is football. Because in either game - life or football - the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don't quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast, and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's gonna make the fucking difference between winning and losing. Between living and dying. I'll tell you this, in any fight, it's the guy who's willing to die who's gonna win that inch. And I know, if I'm gonna have any life anymore it's because I'm still willing to fight and die for that inch. Because that's what living is, the six inches in front of your face.
Now, I can't make you do it. You've got to look at the guy next to you, look into his eyes. Now, I think you're going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You're gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team, because he knows when it comes down to it you're gonna do the same for him. That's a team, gentlemen, and either we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football guys, that's all it is.
Now, what are you gonna do?
Heady stuff for a Starbucks manager meeting, I think you'll agree. But there's a reason it's been on my mind, and it has to do with finding some kind of value in what I do with the vast majority of my time. In many ways, I'm starting to feel like I'm looking at the rest of my life, and I suppose I'm trying to find some way to frame it that doesn't feel like I've somehow failed.
There's time, of course, to do many things, but those opportunities have been there for long enough that not taking them has gathered its own meaning, and that's led me to this line of thinking, this wondering what value the things I've done have when left to stand alone, without the ever-present belief that this is all prologue, prelude to defining acts yet to come.
The Pacino speech is absurd in context, as motivation for a group that - in my memory, at least - was largely unconcerned with the importance of coffee, or not on such an epic scale, anyway. But it did ring true in the sense that everything I've done in the fifteen years I've spent toiling away in retail and service on two different continents has been about teams, about taking them apart and putting them back together, about creating them from nothing or merely fine-tuning them. About winning.
I had reason to consider this in a conversation I had earlier this week, where I suddenly felt compelled, amidst the shrapnel of self-deprecation that usually flies when I talk about my day job, to defend what I do, to point out the times when I've been a mentor to kids who otherwise had no guidance, the times I've given people who'd never won a thing in their lives pride in achieving something, in being number one, even if it was just in some contest for who could sell the most smoothies, the times I've stood up for people - and one or two of them might even read this - who might not have deserved it for the sake of a second chance.
I haven't cured any diseases or fought for any grand causes. Mostly, I've sold shit. And if I'm honest, I've never been all that great at it. But every time somebody says I'm the best manager they've ever had or that the place where they work hasn't been the same since I left, I feel pride. Pride that I made a difference, no matter how small it may have been. That may not be living and dying and the six inches in front of your face, but it's something. And sometimes that something's got to be enough to keep you going.
posted at 11:15 PM
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